Well, your time-jumps are getting longer and longer, and remember human history isn’t that long, relatively speaking.

‘Go on,’ Polly snapped, acutely aware of how little history she knew.

OK, like it was once explained to me at school: if you compared the whole sweep of Earth’s history to one day, then human history occupies about the last two minutes of that.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Polly suddenly felt very cold.

I’m serious. Earth is four billion years old, and modern humans have only been around for about one thousandth part of that. Dinosaurs, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, existed for about a hundred and sixty million years, yet died out some sixty million years before we appeared.

Even as he said it, Polly recalled with painful clarity the small facts she herself had picked up almost by osmosis while watching films and taking part in interactives. She recited, ‘And before the dinosaurs, hundreds of millions of years of life on land and in sea, and before that only in the sea, then even more time without life at all.’

You’re now getting it. Seems your brain is waking up.

‘Yeah, seems like it.’

Polly trudged towards the reeds where she assumed she would find a river, as that seemed as good a destination as any. Upon reaching the high parsleys, she reached out to brush them aside.

Stop right there.

‘What?’

Those plants are hemlock, so don’t get their juice on your skin—they’re poisonous.

Polly veered around the stand of hemlock and headed for a gap through to the reeds. Soon she found herself alongside a fast-flowing river, its bottom sandy and pebbled, underneath a slow ballet of strands of waterweed. Soon she found a shallow part, the water’s surface broken by a pebbled prominence, where she crossed and began to walk upstream. Eventually she found a fallen log to sit on. Her hunger had become a constant gnawing in her gut, so she took out her tobacco and made a roll-up, in the hope that it might still the pangs. Staring down into the debris caught where the fallen tree’s branches penetrated the river bottom, she froze suddenly and found her hunger the last thing on her mind.

‘I think I know what time we’ve arrived in,’ she whispered.

And how do you…? Oh.

‘You see him, too?’

Trapped, amid debris, with water flowing over it like a transparent skin, lay a rotting human corpse. White bone and grinning teeth showed through where much of his face had slewed away, white fingerbones dotted the river bed, the remaining flesh was washed almost colourless. But the leather helmet, breastplate and one leather sandal remained. Tatters of cloth flowed about his hips. His eye sockets were empty.

Your leaps through time are indeed getting longer.

‘He’s a Roman soldier, isn’t he?’

A legionary, yes, so this time you’ve shot back over a thousand years. The Romans were here from about 100BC until around AD400.

Polly continued puffing silently on her cigarette. When the scale moved her backwards next, who could know when she would end up? How could she make any plans for her own future when she kept regressing further into the past? She stood and continued upstream.

‘I don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do?’

All you’ve ever done, really: survive.

The era of the andrewsarchus was like balmy spring compared to this period. It seemed as if someone had just opened a furnace door, and Tack did not relish the prospect of stepping from the mantisal when they landed. Coptic, who was currently controlling the bioconstruct, remained where he was, as the mantisal slid on through the air, ten metres above the ground. Meelan began whispering urgently to Coptic and gestured to the structure encaging them. Coptic spat a reply, nodding ahead. Tack assumed this exchange was something to do with how the mantisal’s glassy struts were becoming clouded, as if filling up with smoke, though he had no idea what this might signify.

Gazing downwards, Tack observed dense scrubland broken only by striated rock formations and red earthen tracks. Looking ahead, he saw that this arid landscape extended as far as distant misted mountains crouching above the flat shimmer of heat haze. Immediately below them, creatures resembling a cross between camel and deer went crashing into concealing scrub. Others, like deer with elephantine snouts, spread honking along well-trodden trails. A lone beast like a rhinoceros, but with twin club-shaped horns on its snout, looked up, then stamped its feet, before lowering its head and charging away. Then, slowly becoming visible through the haze, appeared a sight that did not belong in this distant age at all.

Behind a high steel palisade rose a conglomeration of cylindrical structures like a chemical plant, but painted in various shades of burnt sienna, green and yellow, so as to blend into the landscape. To one side of this complex lay the gutted ruins of huge craft. These possessed stubby glide wings and bloated nacelles, now gradually decaying into the plain. Spaceships perhaps, but Tack wasn’t to know, nor could he safely ask.

‘Pig City,’ muttered Meelan, her attention focused on the newer structures rather than on the once-streamlined vehicles.

Tack noted a hint of contempt in her voice. She now turned her attention to her arm stump. He watched her pull away the strangely distorted dressing, as if it was a dried-out scab, and drop it out between the lower struts of the mantisal. An embryonic limb was revealed. She grinned at Tack triumphantly, and he quickly switched his attention elsewhere.

To clear the palisade, Coptic took the mantisal higher. Now the clouding throughout the construct’s cagelike body was resolving into black veins, and its flight was becoming erratic. Tack suspected some problem. He returned his attention to their destination, where he observed, mounted on a tower set in the fence, some sort of gun tracking their progress.

‘Why is it called Pig City?’ he risked asking, and received an irritated glare from Coptic.

Meelan was more forthcoming. She gestured to a herd of animals gathered outside the palisade. Though these battle-scarred monsters bore some resemblance to wild boar, their mouths were crocodilian and crammed with broken teeth, and they themselves were the size of a rhinoceros. ‘Enteledonts. I’m told the Umbrathane here regularly give them little treats and provide them with water, and in exchange can rest assured that no one is likely to approach on foot—which is why we aren’t.’

Two of the fearsome monsters were between them tearing apart a bloody mess of bones and flesh, and Tack assumed this must be one of those treats. When he glimpsed a boot nearby with some of its owner still inside, he swallowed dryly.

Coptic brought their transport in over the wall and down.

‘Out,’ he ordered, withdrawing his hands from the mantisal’s eyes, which now were black at their core.

As Tack dropped to the ground, he observed four people walking over towards them. Two men and two women. They were Umbrathane he knew because he had been told, but otherwise he would never have been able to distinguish them as a different kind from Traveller. One of the women he recognized at once as Iveronica—the woman in the rock. Following Tack out of the mantisal, Coptic snared him by the collar and marched him forward. Behind them came a familiar rush of chill air as the mantisal began to disappear. Tack glanced back and watched it folding away slowly and unevenly, its structure beginning to evaporate. Coptic jerked him towards the approaching four. A harsh, staccato conversation ensued, Meelan sounding by far the most vocal. Listening intently, Tack recognized the name ‘Saphothere’, and frequent use of the word ‘fistik’ while Meelan gestured at her newly growing arm, but otherwise their exchange was lost on him. Glancing to one side, he spotted a grinning woman standing by the palisade tossing from a small tin what looked like sweets out to the enteledonts. The beasts fought amongst themselves as they gobbled them up, thick drool hanging from their jaws like glass rods. Tack now had no doubt where he would end up once he was no longer of any use to these people. At that moment he felt Coptic grab up his arm, to show Iveronica Tack’s nascent tor.